Cambridge to Study Technology’s Risk to Humans

November 26, 2012

Source:

— DAWN.com

Could computers become cleverer than humans and take over the world? Or is that just the stuff of science fiction? Philosophers and scientists at Britain’s Cambridge University think the question deserves serious study. A proposed Center for the Study of Existential Risk will bring together experts to consider the ways in which super intelligent technology, including artificial intelligence, could ”threaten our own existence,” the institution announced.

”In the case of artificial intelligence, it seems a reasonable prediction that some time in this or the next century intelligence will escape from the constraints of biology,” Cambridge philosophy professor Huw Price said. When that happens, ”we’re no longer the smartest things around,” he said, and will risk being at the mercy of ”machines that are not malicious, but machines whose interests don’t include us.”